It was after the adrenaline wore off that Brandi Hicken started to feel a pain in her side.
After her husband was struck in the leg. After she’d made it out of a burning building where a shooter had ambushed the church where her family had gathered.
After she’d rushed their 5-year-old daughter to the hospital for a bleeding wound on the center of the child’s back that looked to be a bullet hole. Doctors brought Hicken’s daughter to an operating room and found no bullet or fragments in the wound, Hicken wrote in a Facebook post recounting the experience on Sept. 28, when an armed man drove his pickup into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Grand Blanc Township and started shooting.
It was only after all that that the mother of three noticed the blood all over her dress. And the two shrapnel wounds on her own body. Doctors examined her. She was OK, too. Someone was protecting them, she wrote. Maybe even someone divine.
“We had angels looking out for us,” she wrote later. Their family was home from the hospital. They were safe, she informed her Facebook friends. Hicken in a text message confirmed her posts to the Detroit Free Press.
Brandi and Jared Hicken, and their daughter Piper, are among the survivors of the Sept. 28 shooting, she wrote. The shooting has rattled Grand Blanc, leaving four people dead.
Jared Hicken is a resident in Emergency Medicine, according to the Deseret News and Henry Ford Health’s website. Brandi Hicken wrote her husband helped the wounded at the church even after he was injured himself. Henry Ford Genesys Hospital doctors said several of the hospital’s residents were members of the church during an Oct. 1 news conference.
The shooting − in all its heaviness, in the aftermath with time spent in the hospital, and the time spent sharing fundraiser after fundraiser for community members recovering from gunshot wounds and families who lost cherished loved ones − has only fortified the family’s faith, she wrote in another post on Oct. 1.
“This experience has only made us stronger in our faith,” she wrote. “We have experienced and witnessed miracles, we have been carried by God this week through all of you and strangers around the nation who have been so diligently praying for us and our friends and our community.”
Hicken’s dispatches about life in the immediate aftermath are optimistic about faith and about the community directing kindness in many forms to her family: through “food, encouragement, financial support” and more.
“There have been so many more good things than bad things,” she wrote. Adding later, “It’s endless and it’s powerful. We feel it. We feel it immensely.”
Contact Lily Altavena: laltavena@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: ‘Many more good things than bad’: Mother hurt in Grand Blanc Twp. shooting on faith
Reporting by Lily Altavena, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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